Produced in partnership with W Sydney
We discuss the challenge and satisfaction of personalisation and delivering laidback luxury service with genuine authenticity, how planner expectations are changing, activating different spaces in the hotel for events and – breaking news – W Sydney’s soon-to-open new event space.
“In the luxury space, personalisation is becoming a must,” said Rosier. “Almost like sustainability.
“Our service credo in this hotel is Whatever/Whenever. It’s a W Hotels’ brand differentiator.
“We say that we’ll do whatever you want, whenever you want. As long as it’s legal, then we’ll take care of it.
“And obviously, that’s very difficult to deliver.
“It does create a service expectation that we talk to our talent about. We say, ‘Look, whenever a guest wants something, don’t just say yes or no. Either make it happen or make something else happen’. But at least something needs to happen.
“We see a lot of fun and creativity around this,” says Rosier.
“We had a guest that came this weekend that challenged us [to] a handstand competition.
“So, our talent went around the hotel and they did handstands everywhere. And they took photographs and put them in his room and said ‘challenge accepted’.
“And it turned out that this guest was working for some kind of acrobatic group or something like that…so it went back and forth.
“He was doing handstands and we were doing handstands. Whoever in the hotel could do handstands was doing [them].
“It was just a small thing that doesn’t cost anything. But it gives you a very unique insight into the kind of service and the kind of experience that we want to deliver,” says Rosier.
W Sydney’s irreverent, ‘we’ll do anything’ attitude extends to the way the hotel’s team delivers for event groups.
This includes things like creating bespoke vegemite lamingtons as an arrival experience for an international group.
Rosier says this is part of the W brand experience.
“It’s a brand that encourages social interactions. And yes, we want you to have a relaxed and unique stay, but it should also be a little bit fun. We want guests to walk out of the hotel and think, ‘that was different, I’ve never had that experience before’.
“To create that is difficult but it’s also fun. And hopefully it will make work for our associates more interesting and challenge them a little bit.
“It’s difficult to control it because you still need to make sure that they do it with the hotel’s luxury and lifestyle standard in mind.”
But when they get it right, it certainly delivers on the brand promise.
Part of the W Hotel ethos is individualised service from the hotel team, which plays out for individual guests and those coming for events and, for Rosier, helps set W Sydney apart from other more traditional hotels.
“What we try to promote is authenticity… we try to create a space where you can be yourself and our talent can be themselves as well.
“So, we encourage [the team] to have personalised conversations, authentic conversations that are unique to them. We don’t script what they are saying.
“There are boundaries, of course, but we like to encourage them to be themselves as much as possible because it creates a genuine human interaction.
“If you look at a classic luxury hotel, it’s a very hierarchy-driven relationship that you have with your service provider,” says Rosier. “We don’t want that. We want a very personal relationship. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”
The hotel also trains staff to read guest cues in order to elevate stays and experiences at the hotel even further.
“We are challenging all our talent, whether it’s in the bars or the restaurant or on the event floor or behind the reception desk, to create wow moments for our guests, to listen to cues, pick them up and play with them and have some fun with them.”
He says these moments are less about creating an expensive experience and more about creating a moment where guests “really feel like, oh, this hotel gets us”.
Leaning into their identity as a luxury lifestyle hotel is just as important for event groups as for individual travellers.
Alongside more last-minute requests and planners leaning more on the hotel as a kind of event consultant, Rosier notes that “budgets are obviously always under pressure, but expectations are rising” amongst event planners.
“Especially from a luxury lifestyle hotel, [event planners] expect a lot and they expect us to make the experience unique and personal and very authentic.”
To do this, Rosier says the hotel team capitalises both on the property’s physical assets and its service culture.
Spectacular water views from W Sydney’s largest event space – the Great Room with capacity for up to 600 delegates – certainly help.
The team also activates multiple other spaces for events.
“We like to move people around the building, to create different experiences in different areas,” says Rosier.
There are post-event drinks and afterparties at the sky-high 29/30 rooftop bar and adjoining WET Deck that houses the hotel’s outdoor rooftop pool, as well as personalised, bite-sized event experiences on open spaces on a trio of floors between the dedicated event floor and 29/30.
In fact, it seems almost any space is on the table to become part of the event experience at W Sydney.
For one group, the team created a martini bar inside their lift, serving up miniature martinis via an entertaining bartender. This experience was delivered as part of a trio, with another section of the group having themed cocktails served from a bellhop trolley beneath W Sydney’s neon chandelier on Level 11, while a third group received shots of sake and bumps of caviar while travelling up W Sydney’s iconic blue escalator, served up by the hotel’s Insider team, going in the other direction on the adjacent downward escalator.
These intermediate spaces became flashpoints for connection between delegates.
“When they come together, they can all talk about their experience and kind of brag that theirs was cooler than the others,” explains Rosier.
W Sydney also offers up its Penthouse for event use for smaller or VIP groups of 30 to 40.
“We’ve done a lot of private events there and they can be interesting,” says Rosier.
“We put bands in there, we put music in there, we remove beds to help transform the space to suit the event’s needs.
“These experiences can be pretty elaborate.”
Personalisation for events can mean company logos on cakes or cocktails, bringing in your own chef and completely bespoke menus.
“We are open with every single event to tailor [the menu] if you want to have it tailored,” says Rosier.
Another part of the luxury lifestyle event experience, especially at W Sydney, where beverage comes before food – B&F rather than F&B – is barista coffee being part of every event.
“People are expecting this,” says Rosier. He’s right, but many hotels don’t offer it as the standard.
There’s more personalisation to come with W Sydney’s new event space, officially opening in April 2027.
The new space – around 130m2, excluding its pre-function space on a lower level – has been designed to be as flexible as possible, in response to demand for a space that can be branded and be anything an event organiser wants it to be. The space will have an exterior entrance in Darling Harbour, as well as an entrance from the lobby, and boast the same views out over the water as the Living Room, W’s signature lobby bar, and the Great Room, W Sydney’s ballroom.
Rosier believes personalisation will continue to evolve as part of the hotel experience, particularly in the wellness space.
He’s anticipating “healthy cocktails, protein shakes, vegan coffee breaks”.
“Alcohol-free events, for example…I don’t think they’re very prominent in Australia yet, but in Europe, they’re huge. And I think soon they’ll be similarly popular here,” he says.
“So how do we do a cocktail reception with just as much alcohol-free wine as alcoholic wine and alcohol-free beer? How do we balance that out?
“How can we create cocktails that are alcohol-free, but still very interesting? I think those kinds of things are definitely going to further develop in the future.”
He says increasingly guests – for events and individual travellers – are seeking personalised, unique experiences “that they don’t see on a website”. W Sydney is already equipped to deliver on this, with their considerable team of W Insiders advising guests and groups on the hidden gems of the Sydney experience.
“It used to be a one-person job, it’s now a team,” says Rosier.
“We have a team of eight, nine people under the supervision of a director.
“We really look at tailored, personalised little experiences that usually are very localised, they’re very unique, but that spark the imagination of our guests.”
In an event context, this plays out particularly in what the hotel calls an “Insiders break”. For one international group, who spent most of their event experience within W Sydney, the Insiders brought in four iconic Sydney bakeries – Lode Pies, Black Star Pastry, Lune and Tokyo Lamington – for a morning tea break, with each bakery serving up a spread of what makes them so famous and offering delegates a little taste of what Sydney locals line up for.
Rosier also notes that the W brand has matured somewhat since it was launched in New York in the late 1990s.
“The W Hotels brand 20 years ago was about being the disruptor, and very much leaning into that,” he says.
“Now, we are luxury liberated.
“But still, we can have a little bit of fun.
“Sometimes we’re a little bit daring, a little bit bold.”
